Transport properties of anisotropic superconductors: Influence of arbitrary electron-impurity phase shifts.

Abstract

We investigate electron-impurity scattering in a number of unconventional superconducting states with a low impurity concentration, making no assumption about the phase shift in the normal state. The scattering amplitude in the superconducting states is found not to exhibit particle-hole symmetry, and not to be invariant under time reversal. As a consequence, we find that there can be large thermoelectric effects, and that some tensor components of transport coefficients that vanish in the normal state can be finite in the superconducting state. Detailed calculations of the quasiparticle relaxation time, thermoelectric coefficients, viscosities and thermal conductivity are performed for the axial and polar p-wave states and an axial d-wave state.